Regarding the whole "racism" nonsense...
I'm pretty sure you know better than that. You've shown that you are aware enough of the topic to be aware of the accusations flying around regarding Epic and Tencent and the context of them.
My comment was referencing global politics and the modern "red scare". It's about the numerous accusations of espionage regarding Tencent being an actor and data gathering for the Chinese government, and accusations that Epic is complicit and enabling it. Accusations that thus far have no real evidence and seem to be little more than attempts to prey on people's political biases, and the new chilled pre-post-war slap fight.
That has nothing to do with anyone's ethnicity. Accusing the Russians of espionage by way of election tampering doesn't make someone racist against Russians, and that's true regardless of how much truth there is to the allegations. This is no different.
It's not "*Gasp* CHINESE PEOPLE!"
It's "*Gasp* COMMUNISTS!"
You can go fuck yourself for falsely trying to tie it to racism.
Falsely? You're the one who started the entire fucking racism narrative. Don't try to toss that on me, I just said Epic was scummy, which they are, and you suddenly started crying about China.
Moving on to everything else...
Valve got lucky that it wasn't worse than it was, that's all. The point is they are not immune to the same kinds of issues that every other online service might experience for various reasons.
There have been several large data breaches at Valve over the past several years, often involving financial information, usually by way of hacking. Valve itself said back in 2015 that around 77,000 accounts are hacked every month, and at the time said that number was growing. That means probably at least around a million accounts are hacked per year. That can be defined as "secure" exactly why?
Are you ignorant, or just intentionally misleading here? There's a difference between an account getting hacked because of poor user security, and because of poor VALVe security. 77k accounts get hacked every month because users are dumb, VALVe isn't fucking leaking 70k+ fucking accounts every month jesus christ.
It took ten years for them to patch a known bug in the client that allowed remote access to user's PCs.
It also took 10 years for dedicated security researchers to find it, and it was never actually exploited, and the second it was brought to their attention, they fixed it, iirc in less than a day. That's an ABSURD turnaround!
You are not "safer" on Steam than you are on any other service.
PS Online says hi with their plaintext passwords that get leaked every other year. In all it's years of running, there has been a SINGLE breach in Steam that was actually VALVe's fault- in 2011, there was a hack that allowed a single malicious entity access to a database that had usernames, hashed+salted passwords (which, if they were trying to crack those, they should accomplish that by about the year 2260), game purchases, email addresses, billing address (the big no-no here) and encrypted CC information (which will be decrypted by... possibly the heat death of the universe. Assuming you have access to a supercomputer cluster. Or five.)
Within an hour of the breach they shut the whole thing down, fixed it, then announced it. Also, they said there's no evidence any information was actually exfiltrated, and in all the years past that data has never shown up, not in any collections, not in any darkweb sales, nothing, not even a mention of anyone having it- which means that with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, more than likely no data WAS exfiltrated, they caught the intrusion fast enough.
That's it. One breach, on a properly encrypted table, with proper data seperation, that gave away pretty much just billing addresses, and the entire thing was dealt with quickly and professionally, in 15 years. Steam has, by far, the best security history of any distribution platform.
Also, "class act"? You're seriously remembering that with rose colored glasses.
Remembering what? The CDN cache data breach that VALVe had nothing to do with, refused to name and shame the company, took responsibility for it even though there was literally nothing they could have done other than run their own CDN? Or do you mean the 10 year bug, which they had no reason to even disclose, yet the responsibly disclosed it (responsible disclosure is a huge deal in the security world) after they fixed it, and then allowed the security researchers that found it full credit when that's NOT standard?
Funnily, people said the same things about Steam's "anti-competitive" and "anti-consumer" practices when Fallout NV launched, followed by numerous other games that required Steam to run on PC. Look how that turned out.
Pretty well? NV fans were bitching because there was DRM and none of them understood how to mod, and there was a lot of assumptions that Steam wouldn't allow them to mod, they couldn't lend it to friends, and there was no manual, it owuld be more expensive, that it would be always-online. Except, surprise surprise, steam's DRM is one of the lightest around, it's not always online, it's not more expensive, and certainly doesn't stop modding- hell, workshop's entire point is modding. It was an over-reaction that was tempered to realism after it launched. And frankly, the rest of the shit like box copies and manuals isn't VALVe's fault, take that up with Bethesda/Obsidian.
I've seen and heard all this before, directed at Valve. This is the same shit, on a different day. I see no reason that the end result will not be the same.
Yeah, a decade and a half ago, when text messaging still costs money, AIM was the primary communication tool if you weren't using Xfire, and Google was barely out of diapers. Things change over time, lessons are learned.... except not only is epic's launcher making the same mistakes Steam did a decade and a half later, they're adding security problems on top of it.
My issue isn't the idea that Epic sucks, because they absolutely do. My problem is the double standard falsehood that Steam doesn't and is somehow better or safer. They absolutely are not.
You are factually and categorically wrong, as proven all throughout this post.
There is no "good guy" in this scenario, it is two huge lawful evil entities competing that don't give a fuck about anything but their own bottom lines. The only real difference is that one is more established than the other and we've grown accustomed to their bullshit and have had time to get over it.
No. VAVLe has proven, time and time again, that given the option between an option A that greatly benefits VALVe or an option B that slightly benefits VALVe but ALSO benefits consumers, they will choose option B every time. One only needs to look at the sheer amount of money they've pumped into open source projects.
The only reason I'm even slightly for the situation at all is because of the effective monopoly Steam has, and the problems it is creating. Despite what some might argue, GoG, Uplay, and Origin aren't enough to say that isn't true. Just because they don't have a literal monopoly, does not mean that they do not basically have complete control of the market just due to how much of it they control.
And have they ever abused that monopoly? Forced exclusives? Denied you access to your games? Refused refunds? There's a reason GoG, Uplay, and Origin haven't broken their monopoly, and it's not because of anti-competitive practices from VALVe.
Epic is a shitty company too, but the two of them being in direct and serious competition may actually force them both to be slightly less shitty as they vie for the attention of consumers and be better for the overall industry.
Except all Epic is doing is being shitty towards consumers to try and force them away from Steam, who is responding by.... continuing to not be shitty, even in the face of Epic Game's CEO publicly taunting VALVe. Like, how much 'less shitty' are you wanting VALVe to become here? They aren't going to give out free games, they've never forced exclusives, they don't jack up prices, they have one of the greatest gaming refunds policies of all time, they engage the community and dump money into open source that increase consumer freedom of options. What are you wanting from them?
I don't want Epic to "win", because that would mean they would take over Steam's effective monopoly and they'd be just as bad if not worse once they had that position. What I want is a stalemate, which would be better for the market overall and could lead to others having a better chance to grow and compete as well.
I still maintain that if Steam is left in the position it has unchallenged, we're heading for another games collapse just like the one that happened in '83, for the exact same reasons, because Valve apparently has no concept of hindsight.
The gaming collapse of '83 was because of lack of regulations, lack of oversight, and trying to force games on consumers by limiting choice even when the market had shown what it wanted.
Would I prefer to see someone besides Epic do it?
Sure, but Epic is pretty much the only one bothering with even attempting it at all and I think we need that second big storefront to be there and wrest the near total control of the digital distribution market Valve has away from them for the sake of a healthy market long term more than I dislike Epic as a company. Epic is pretty much the only one to ever even really threaten to be a contender, Origin and Uplay never even came close.
Again, you're project some kind of near-fanatical hatred towards either VALVe or VALVe's dominant position and assuming it's 'bad' for the gaming market.
If simply being a good service was enough, GoG would already be in that position. We've seen how that has worked out.
Epic isn't even really the worst option. Better them than EA, Activision/Blizzard, or god forbid, the fucking Yakuza money laundering scheme, otherwise known as "Konami".
I mean, yes, of course, Genghis fucking Khan could ressurect himself and force you to buy games he publishes at axe-point, that doesn't make Epic any less shitty. This isn't even a valid argument.
At any rate, at the end of the day, if someone is really that worried about their personal information and security, they need to just stop buying things online period.
As apparently the only person in this conversation that understands PII, that's not how that works. At all.
The tl;dr of this is that you seem to think VALVe cannot be trusted with any kind of virtual digital distribution monopoly, and that anything justifies Epic's actions since they're attempting to break it. VALVe has had this monopoly for over a decade, and has done nothing with it but tried to move gaming forward. Epic's very first actions on getting money has been to play fast and loose with customer data, disregard customer opinions, and force an exclusivity war on gamers who have traditionally mocked the very concept.. VALVe can, in my opinion, be trusted to hold gaming together until a true competitor emerges. Pinning all your hopes on Epic while ignoring their etiquette in the gaming community, will be bad for gaming.
Just wait for a better competitor, VALVe isn't going to ruin PC gaming any time soon.